The storm over snooping moves to Paris and Berlin

Few actions have sown more dissension among western nations than Edward Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance by American and British intelligence agencies. The outrage was loudest in Germany and France, where politicians and the public discovered that spies had snooped on national leaders, including tapping into the mobile phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel herself.

Two years on, controversy over spying and surveillance is again raging in Paris and Berlin. This time, however, the focus of attention is not on US and British spooks but on domestic ones. France and Germany have been engulfed in debate over claims that their own spies are operating without effective oversight by politicians.

In France, the controversy centres on legislation passed by the National Assembly regarding the role of the intelligence services. True, the law finally puts the French agencies on a statutory footing after decades in which they appeared to operate with a carte blanche. Critics argue that the new law is an overreaction to the recent jihadi attacks in Paris that killed 17 people. They worry that it grants sweeping surveillance powers with few checks and balances.

In Germany, the row about surveillance is, if anything, even more heated. Reports in the German press have suggested that the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, helped the US to spy on various European bodies, including the French presidency and foreign ministry, as well as the European Commission. Airbus, the European aerospace and defence group, is sufficiently concerned it was a target to have filed a criminal complaint.

Both these controversies raise questions that government leaders need to answer. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there may be strong political support in France for anti-terror legislation. But the security services' new powers appear too extensive. The text of the new law allows them not only to "prevent terrorism" but also to defend France's "major foreign policy interests" and its "industrial and scientific interests". This is too vague a remit.

In Germany, the focus of attention is on the supervision of the BND by Ms Merkel's chancellery in the decade she has been in power. Her critics want to be told who knew what and when about the BND's activities. Her government has not yet explained in detail whether the BND helped the US to conduct economic espionage that bore no relation to security threats.

As they navigate their way through these political storms, government leaders in France and Germany should keep two principles in mind. First, given the jihadi threat in Europe, their intelligence services do need to co-operate with friendly nations to protect their own citizens. This is only possible if they generate usable intelligence that they can bring to the table. In the case of Germany, this means confronting domestic squeamishness about surveillance, which is itself a product of that country's past under the Nazis and the Communists. Ms Merkel has not done a very good job of selling the importance of the intelligence services to a sceptical public.

It is also vital that both governments ensure that the work of all their security services is accompanied by strong judicial and parliamentary oversight. Citizens cannot be given an absolute right to privacy if intelligence chiefs are to fight terrorism effectively. But democracies need structures, which oversee the security services rigorously and ensure they do not operate outside the law. In both France and Germany it is not yet clear that such structures are fully in place.

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